April 2025
There is so much to say about the end of my formal education. I should write a book. I put some of my thoughts down last month, but I have a host of experiences I want to relate and yet can’t. Not publicly, anyway. Not yet.
But I can tell you: I graduated. I now hold a bachelor’s degree with a major in creative writing and a minor in computer science. I got a job almost immediately. I start tomorrow in an entry-level position for data annotation. It’ll be my first full-time job since October 2008. The story of how I survived that long without an income is buried in the pages of this website. Suffice it to say, the last two decades of my life have been a long dream I’m only now waking from.
I’m not interested in writing memoirs. These posts are enough and, as with the bulk of my middle-age adventures through university, the vast majority of my thoughts remain private. Unreported. As I think it should be. The words spoken are silver, those unsaid are gold, or so the saying goes.
Self-studies
As soon as I finished my final final exam, I felt a heavy burden lift from my shoulders. Climbing the accursed hillside stairs at Vancouver Island University to my car for the last time, breathing deep the spring air and feeling the warm sun on my face, I realized that I was truly free from obligation for the first time in almost ten years. As I’d already secured employment and income at that point, the rushing sense of liberation almost knocked me flat.
I returned home and immediately set up a program of self-study. These are the subjects I’m learning, in no particular order:
- FL Studio (digital music production)
- PostgreSQL (database management software)
- Rust (programming language)
- Database Design
- Object-Oriented Fundamentals (programming)
- Introductory Statistics
- Blender (3D modeling software)
- git (computer file version control)
- Krita (digital painting software)
- Obsidian (note-taking software)
- Kdenlive (video production software)
- C++ (programming language)
I could talk at length about the hows and whys of this, but I’ll hold off until I’ve spent more time doing. I also don’t know what effect working eight-hour days, Monday to Friday, will have on my free time—other than violently reducing it.
I’ll let you know next month.
Media
Bit of a slim month for media consumption, but having most days occupied with biting my nails over whether or not I would pass critical university exams has a tendency to limit one’s time.
Read
- John French’s Mortis
- POETRY OCTOBER 2024
- Albert Camus’s The Stranger
Watched
- Julian Jarrold’s Red Riding: 1974
- Zhao Liang’s Behemoth
- Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men
- Kyle Killen, Steven Kane, and David Wiener’s Halo
- Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s Heretic
- Alex Garland’s Devs
- Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant
- Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead
- Rob McElhenney, Megan Ganz, and Charlie Day’s Mythic Quest
Listened
- Viagra Boys's viagr aboys
Behemoth was soul-crushingly excellent, The Stranger was not what I expected (people had been asking me if I’d read Camus for years, now I have), and Devs gave me the most to think about.
Okay. I wish I had more creative output to share. I hope there’ll be some in a month. But finishing university at age fifty—which meant returning cold to computer science after five years away—and completing the degree is accomplishment enough.
For now.
2025.04.01 – 2025.04.30